Quote:
Originally Posted by Introvox
Cows eat grass.....how many people eat grass?
Cows and other animals also eat a lot of waste products that humans don't want, this is also a good thing.
Beef is the biggest consumption in the meat chain.
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We don't eat grass and obviously, if we didn't keep animals to eat grass, then we wouldn't be growing grass for them to eat. We'd use those fields to grow something we could eat instead.
As for the waste products that we wouldn't eat anyways that pigs eat, we could use that as compost and thus, the nutrition from that would enter the plants we eat.
If you think of it as a simple energy equation where you try to maximize the energy through food, you'll see that a lot of it is wasted if you want to keep animals as a trophic level in there. An animal takes most of the energy from a pound of corn (example) and spends that just living - walking around, breathing, thinking, cellular metabolism and so on. Cutting animals from the equation would mean we'd get that energy instead. Believe me, you could feed the world a lot more efficiently if everyone were vegetarians.
The counter-argument to this is in areas that are unsuitable for agriculture (f.ex grassy, but rocky slopes with boulders). There it might make sense to keep animals, even if you follow this maximize-food ideal.
